“I wonder why I’m in the same damn place, right where you left me, in disarray,” Wood Ear’s Nate Tarr sings on the band’s marvelous piece of organ-fueled, twangy power pop, “Leave My Walls.” The song’s an obvious highlight from the Durham band’s new  seven-song Steeple Vultures, and its opening line practically begs the question: Is that where ya been, Wood Ear?

In our fly-by-data landscape, six years qualifies as a geologic era, but that’s the span between Steeple Vultures and Wood Ear’s debut EP, The Hard Way – and those songs were reportedly put to tape two years prior to that. So for all intents, this is a re-boot, even if the intervening years were taken up, as Tarr says on the band’s website, by circumstance and adult life and the “occasional lack of motivation” — not to mention his wife (and Wood Ear keyboardist) Krystal Black’s bout with breast cancer last year.

But as a statement of repurpose and resurgence, you couldn’t do better than a high-octane cut like “Leave My Walls.” The three-and-a-half-minute track opens with a quick-picked “Pretty Persuasion”-like guitar riff before Black’s organ kicks in, her manic comping offering an immediate connection to Steve Nieve’s best early-Attractions work.

Soon enough, over just that nervy guitar riff, Tarr’s asking why he’s still stuck in this heartache disarray, his voice a downtrodden blend of Jay Farrar’s twang overtones delivered with J Mascis’ laconic phrasing. But as the song gains momentum and the tempo quickens, propelled by drummer Rob Koegler and bassist Frank Andolina, the song’s chorus — “You didn’t leave my walls/you tore ‘em down” — becomes a defiant accusatory roar.

It leads to a late bridge with an old fashioned but brief guitar solo, the opening riff morphing into the type of string-bending noise Bob Stinson might’ve dropped atop a Westerberg rocker. In the end, as the chorus rings over and over, it’s the Replacements’ beautiful-loser lineage that, at least on this track, makes the most sense. And for fans of college and indie guitar rock, that’s a great place for a re-boot.

Steeple Vultures will be released on Churchkey Records June 12, but “Leave My Walls” is available to stream and/or download below.  —John Schacht